Combat - Comparisons and personal opinions.

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This post that I present here is about how combat is right know, I will add some personal ideas, I will deal with some problems and compare features with other action combat systems(mostly will be Tera and BDO) based on my personal experience and feelings with those systems.

I want to say first, that I don't have access to the alpha, so I don't have first hand experience with the Crowfall combat system, all this is based on videos and about what I have read on the forums.

First point that I want to talk about is animation locks.

A lot of people seem to have a problem with animation locks, thinking that it makes the game clunky, this is where I want to say that, animations lock are actually ok and I will say that are necesary for an action combat game, when I saw the combat in WildStar, which I didn't end up playing, it felt really bad, and this is all personal preferences, but I hate when you have so much freedom of movement that you are almost never in a bad positions because you are never "locked" and the combat is so chaotic that gets annoying.

Tera has a good combat system, and even though when you start to play it might feel slow because of the lack of skills, once you are around level 20 the combat feels much better, I like the commiment of attacks, it is an important part for me.

BDO has kind of the problem of wildstar, I don't know how it feels in PVP, but there is so much freedom of movement, but it has animation locks which is nice.

What I think Crowfall lacks is some ways to cancel animations, I think Tera has this idea well done, where you can cancel an animation with a dodge, but you are limited to the number of cancels that you can do by cooldown, in BDO you can just dodge if you have enough stamina, with the full bar it allows for a lot of movement, more than I personally like, it is still enjoyable.

As far as we know, the devs will add momentun to some attacks, I would say main reason is because chasing feels kind of frustrating in Crowfall, but personally I rather have some kind of locking/slowing when hitting from behind or something like that, which you could avoid with using your dodge/dashes abilities just before the enemie tries to hit you or while he is hitting you, the problem with this mechanic maybe is that Centurions would be pretty strong because of the movement advantage and beeing able to perma slow people making almost impossible to escape.

Anyway, I want to see how the momentun will work before I bash on it, it might end up working fine.

One problem that I might perceive with Crowfall is that maybe, and since I didn't try it and feel it, it is hard to say, but maybe the animation locks are too heavy for the animations and attacks that we have, but again I would actually need to play the game, I don't know, every time I see a video or a stream I feel like something is off with the animations and gameplay, I can't say for sure what it is, maybe the animations need more work, maybe the lack of good effects on hit, but something is missing that makes the gameplay look strange.

Second thing I want to deal with is key bindings, this comes basicly from the recent experience with BDO combat, I really enjoyed the idea of skills binding with both a movement and a key, now, I am not sure how hard would be to adapt the current system to something similar to try out, and might be a thing that can't be change right now because of the stage of development, but the BDO skill biding system and combo system were really nice.

It feels like the BDO combat system is the right next step into the actin combat system after Tera.

I do have some criticism about BDO combat, like excesive movement, and some weird animations like the ranger side attack that seems to float to one side magicly without actually moving there through an animation, just sliding, it feels bad every time i see it.

But in general, the option for side movement attacks, stationary attacks,forward or backwards attacks and combo system was really nice and added some depht mechanics to the combat.

Final thoughts:

Crowfall combat as it is right now lacks something, I do NOT consider animation lock the problem, since there are games that use animation lock and it is not a problem at all, the combo system seems very plain as it is right now, and the lack of on hit effects plus I think animations need some improvements, and the hit box for the attacks doesn't seem particularly good either, all this making it feel weird when seeing at, maybe fixing small thinks will fix the whole problem, maybe something important is lacking I am not sure what the exact problem would be.

I make this post to open a discussion about the current state of the combat, feel free to discuss my specific views or add things you feel are wrong about the combat, I think most people do feel like the combat is lacking something though.

The last thing I want to say, I know is pre-alpha, but I think that it is worth discussing combat, even if things like effects and tweaking animatinos will be done in the future, the devs should know that something feels wrong(at least for me), as a person that has study both art and programming(even though I don't have a lot of experience in both of them), I know that when one person creates something it is perceived different for the creator than for the rest of people, constructive criticism is always good even if it doesn't give any specifics on what to improve but only criticize that something seems off.

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The combat in its current iteration plays horrible in my humble opinion. It feels scripted, slow and exceptionally boring. Most everyone spends their time running around avoiding fights. It is exceptionally easy for certain classes to use the flight mechanism more then the fight buttons.

I hope this does not turn into DC Universe combat 2.0. It actually feels worse then DC Universe right now.

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I was pushing for chorded action to begin with. I only got about 5 minutes into BDO before the beta went down, so I didn't get to experience much, but the kind of directional input attacks your describing are exactly what I'd expect from a modern action game.

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The combat for PvP in Wildstar is the best i have ever experienced in any MMORPG, and i've played alot.

The failure of Wildstar wasnt due to the combat or smt, but just poor management.

The reason why i (and many others) liked it so much was because of the freedom and the level of individual skill that was needed to be trully a god in combat.

The game was really fast paced, but not not at a level that it became annoying.

From what i see in Crowfall atm, it looks very clunky and boring. I hope it will be alot smoother in the final product.

Well, I never said that Wildstar failed because of combat, just that I didn't even tryed it because of how annoying all the effects and lack of commiment on attacks were on the game, at least just from videos looked that way for me and put me really off.

And you can have commiment and fast paced combat, BDO does a good job at it, even though it might be a lot of mobility for me, I kind of dislike the over mobility on videogames, but I come from mainly playing Ragnarok Online when I was young where there were almost no dashes, blinks, etc, you had to be carefull with your position a lot because you coulnd't easily fix a bad position.

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I like freedom of movement but I also dislike overused dashes, teleports and what not. Black desert is a cluster of people teleporting and dashing all around, and that (along with no friendly fire) completely destroys its potential, imho. I was also a Ragnarok player, but yea, the solution is to have the least amount of dashes/teleports while still allowing for a decent movement freedom.

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I like freedom of movement but I also dislike overused dashes, teleports and what not. Black desert is a cluster of people teleporting and dashing all around, and that (along with no friendly fire) completely destroys its potential, imho. I was also a Ragnarok player, but yea, the solution is to have the least amount of dashes/teleports while still allowing for a decent movement freedom.

While I like BDO's combat, I agree that it is a bit excessive in certain areas, just like Tera. However, it would be much easier to tone/speed things down (recent patch did just that for one ability) where as I don't see speeding things up or waving some magic dev tool to make CF's system flow better.

At the same time I feel FF is doomed for the most part in these games for large scale unless it is designed from the start instead of tacked on and players having to work around it to get it to function properly.

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I love the feel of the Fessor dash. I also think the stamina usage is about right.

I say give the squishiest classes those types of escape powers tied to a pool or on a timer.

With more classes and disciplines more snares, stuns, roots will come and the field will level a bit in group play. You won't always see 35% Fessors, 35% Legos and a smattering of the other classes. The greatest strength this combat system has for pure, unadulterated fun is that it isn't trying to balance individual classes vs. one another. It shouldn't in a group combat game like this.

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The big problem with dashes is that once one or two classes have those dashes they tend to be over powered because usually those classes are damage dealers, if you give them high survavility with high damage output, you then have to give all classes high survavility(extra movement) or they will be underpowered compared to the ones with dashes.

That is why I like the less amount of dashes possible, I think crowfall is already putting too many dashes, champion has a huge double leap forward, fessor has the dash, knight has a dash, everyone has a dash, I would rather have different types of movement advantages and disadvantages than just dashes, for example, a class could have an autoattack that slows, but no dashes, so it is hard to get to hit his enemies but once he gets to them it is easy to keep hitting them, another class that goes around traps or areas that snare and slow enemies, this making him a zoning class but without dashes, so he depends on beeing good with the traps and can control the battlefield area and decide where to fight.

This type of different mechanics is what I like in videogames, which makes every class unique, I really liked the WoEs (War of Emperium, basicly gvg in Ragnarok onilne) where you needed the different classes for different purporses in defense or attack, I am not going to say that it was a perfect way to do it, because a lot of classes were pretty repetitive and boring to play during the defense of a castle (wizards spamming one skill all the time, hunters replacing traps, bards pressing a key every 5 mins while doing nothing more, but all was part of a strategy and doing a good defense was gratifying as a whole but not so much as an individual).

I understand that making a class only good at one thing is bad, for example if rangers were only good at traps and had not damage, but what I liked the most about Ragnarok Online was the versatility of a class, I will put as example the class I played, which was Assassin Cross, there was a lot of types of gameplay that I would choose to go for, all focused on damage mainly, but I could go and make a Cross of Sonic Blow, which basicly would mean to focus on trying to oneshot people with one skill and I would need a lot of str and dex, I could go for a build of crit, which was more focus on str,agi and luck, and the use of Katar as weapon, or I could go for a double dagger build, which was based on str,agi and some dex but not luck and was the best build for destroying emperiums(which was how you would conquest a castle) or I could do a build based on Soul Destroyer, which was a skill that was based on str and int, which meant that I would have to put a lot of stat points on Int which is not usual in Assassins classes in any game.

I even saw some random poorly made socks in my time, a Wizard with tons of Agi to farm alone, he had more agi that some assass I knew, and basicly monsters would miss him and he could go alone without a priest or a tank, I saw battle priest, with tons of str, and I will say that those builds were probably bad(for the players that did them was ok and they adapted to it), but you could made them, that freedom of making random and poorly made socksty characters is one of the things that I miss the most in modern MMOs where everyone is the same in every class.

I kind of got into nostalgialand and got carried away off the main argument, but yeah, combat needs some work.

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The big problem with dashes is that once one or two classes have those dashes they tend to be over powered because usually those classes are damage dealers, if you give them high survavility with high damage output, you then have to give all classes high survavility(extra movement) or they will be underpowered compared to the ones with dashes.

The greatest strength this combat system has for pure, unadulterated fun is that it isn't trying to balance individual classes vs. one another. It shouldn't in a group combat game like this.

This may just be one of those areas where I (and the Devs) feel one way about that perceived relative disparity in class "power" and you feel another way.

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One could agree or not. But as much as people present Tera as example, there is something done good there probably.

And as of right now, that's not the case in CF mostly... Whatever "Pre-Alpha" things people throw around to defend it, the problem is not with lack of good execution(ACE will work on that we hope) but lack of clear vision presented.

If Ace was like " We want Tera combat but, we dont like this and this and this, and it will look like that and that and that'' people would know what to expect and all that confusion would be done for. Instead we get ''uh oh we want to add lunges ! to abillities'..... well great, but what kind of combat will we get as result, is probably what people are interested in. Will it be twitch ? How twitch ? Faster or slower then Tera ? Will be able to strafe ? Attack while moving ? and so on.

Tl;dr : I just hope we end with something equally or more fun and satisfying then Tera.

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What happens at level 20 that makes TERA combat feel much better? Tried it but only got to level 10 because pve questing puts me in a coma these days

The amount of skills just get reasonable and basicly you get more options in combat from those skills, making it more fluid, as the game progresses it is better, around level 50 is pretty nice, I enjoyed playing, but end game and leveling system kind of put me off, but the pvp that i played I enjoyed it.

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One could agree or not. But as much as people present Tera as example, there is something done good there probably.

And as of right now, that's not the case in CF mostly... Whatever "Pre-Alpha" things people throw around to defend it, the problem is not with lack of good execution(ACE will work on that we hope) but lack of clear vision presented.

If Ace was like " We want Tera combat but, we dont like this and this and this, and it will look like that and that and that'' people would know what to expect and all that confusion would be done for. Instead we get ''uh oh we want to add lunges ! to abillities'..... well great, but what kind of combat will we get as result, is probably what people are interested in. Will it be twitch ? How twitch ? Faster or slower then Tera ? Will be able to strafe ? Attack while moving ? and so on.

Tl;dr : I just hope we end with something equally or more fun and satisfying then Tera.

While what is "good" is subjective, I have a hard time believing many see CF's combat to be so currently. I much prefer BDO over Tera, but at the same time I don't want BDO/Tera combat in CF.

Problem I have and probably others is that I'm used to seeing games at the earliest in closed beta when most of the key systems are pretty ironed out with just a lot of polish, bug fixing, balance issues or whatever to work on.

The whole crowdfunded/early access makes it difficult for me to fairly judge these products as I have no idea if they are 10%, 25%, 50% near where they hope to be or if they even know.

They could have a huge list of goals/milestones and what not that haven't even been touched on yet when it comes to combat, character animations, skills, effects, etc.

Seems like they've already spent quite a bit of time focused on combat in some form (1.5+ years?) and some of us are still confused as to what they are going for. Thanks to Unity and the talent they have, the game visually looks much better than many alpha versions of games I've seen, but it's the underlying mechanics that I can't see and only experience that have me concerned.

It's easy to say it's pre-alpha or development will never end, even after launch, but at what point do they go "this is it" and fans get to decide if it is for them or not.

I'm all for getting the client controller up to snuff, adding more archetypes, progression, siege mechanics, but all of those layers aren't going to blind me to how poor (IMO) the combat is.

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I really think animation locks are archaic (even tho I think they're done very well in BDO). Not every action mmo (but specifically Crowfall) needs an overabundance of animation locks. Some are okay, but most, not so much.

Movement feels like 100% better when I'm not getting 120+ MS, so I give them major probs. Action Cam and Strafing / Backpeddling FTW.

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I like freedom of movement but I also dislike overused dashes, teleports and what not. Black desert is a cluster of people teleporting and dashing all around, and that (along with no friendly fire) completely destroys its potential, imho. I was also a Ragnarok player, but yea, the solution is to have the least amount of dashes/teleports while still allowing for a decent movement freedom.

The dashes and teleports are a necessity due to the animation lock. Imagine playing a witch/wizard or anything else squish and not being able to put use your dashes / teleports. You'd be screwed. Melees need dashes, because having them wobble in to the middle of a fight is stupid, and in most situations they'd be cut down before they can actually do anything (plus everybody else has dashes, so they need to catch them). It's kind of a slippery slope, but I like a lot of mobility in my combat. Being able to jump, dash, zig, zag, dip and dive is fun, standing around or walking in like a lumbering sack of potatoes in to a fight is boring.

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I really think animation locks are archaic (even tho I think they're done very well in BDO). Not every action mmo (but specifically Crowfall) needs an overabundance of animation locks. Some are okay, but most, not so much.

I don't see how animation lock is archaic, is actually the best we can do for now to emulate commitment on attacks.

The dashes and teleports are a necessity due to the animation lock. Imagine playing a witch/wizard or anything else squish and not being able to put use your dashes / teleports. You'd be screwed. Melees need dashes, because having them wobble in to the middle of a fight is stupid, and in most situations they'd be cut down before they can actually do anything (plus everybody else has dashes, so they need to catch them). It's kind of a slippery slope, but I like a lot of mobility in my combat. Being able to jump, dash, zig, zag, dip and dive is fun, standing around or walking in like a lumbering sack of potatoes in to a fight is boring.

See, this is what I hate, people zig zagging, dashing and bunny jumping like wonderful people in a fight, it is the worst thing that I have ever experienced in videogames. (not trying to be rude, it just gets on my nerves that type of gameplay)

And you said that wizards and that type of classes need dashes, but then you said it yourself, becuase they need dashes the other classes needs dashes, that is why dashes should be really limited in my opinion, dashes are too powerful, if you are a wizzard and put yourself in a position where you can get custard rekt, it is ok to have a dodge/dash mechanic that can save one time, but beeing able to put yourself in those situations constantly and just jump, dash and zig zag away from it all the time is wonderful.

I don't like combat that feels clunky, but I like commitment in my attacks.

Dashes should be really limited either by range, by cooldown or by cost.

But I guess it end up in tastes, you obviously enjoy it and it is ok, I think it rest skill to the gameplay because you can always avoid bad situations, positioning stops to matter and is only about hitting the other guy, strategy becomes to hit the other guy more than he hits you and positioning and how and where you fight stops beeing important, and zoning classes or trap based classes become less usefull because it is almost impossible to be effective, the only thing that matters is to chain cc and deal more damage, when you put an area in the ground and everyone can just get away asap, or people go in an out without easily the area becomes useless.

It is one of the things that I enjoy in LoL, dashes are really limited but everyone has the Flash options which is already limited by range and cooldown but can save you one time every 5 min(or help you kill).

EDIT: Wonderful does not mean actually that in my post, but forum rules I guess.

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They should remove all dashes and put in more rushing. sprinting and actual movement. I'm not against certain classes having teleports, but part of enabling combat with animation lock, and more battlefield order, is that players can't change positions suddenly. "Needing" dashes in order to operate animation lock is about the most absurd justification of all time, the receiver just employs dashes as well to counteract the deliverers dash, and has yet another even better tool to ensure that attacks don't land.

With animation lock, allied and enemy body obstruction, friendly fire, and strategic combat, ACE should literally nail combat to the floor and work attacks and avoidance around much more subtle maneuvers rather than rushing back and forth.

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They should remove all dashes and put in more rushing. sprinting and actual movement. I'm not against certain classes having teleports, but part of enabling combat with animation lock, and more battlefield order, is that players can't change positions suddenly. "Needing" dashes in order to operate animation lock is about the most absurd justification of all time, the receiver just employs dashes as well to counteract the deliverers dash, and has yet another even better tool to ensure that attacks don't land.

With animation lock, allied and enemy body obstruction, friendly fire, and strategic combat, ACE should literally nail combat to the floor and work attacks and avoidance around much more subtle maneuvers rather than rushing back and forth.

I agree totally with the different options for actual movement, in this days it seems like dashes are the only viable movement option.

One way I would like teleports is the way that Reaper uses it in Overwatch, you have to aim it and it is not instantly, giving the posibility to be stopped.